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Saturday, July 23, 2005

Suppose you picked up a printed family history, or visited a family historywebsite and ALL it included were names, dates and places. There would be:

no biographies

no source citations

no chronicles of family traditions

Talk about an antiseptic world!

Talk about an unbelievable compiled family history.

We need the facts, but...

WE ALSO NEED OUR CHILDHOOD MEMORIES -- downthere in black and white in notes for each person on our family tree because:

we knew them personally

our parents told us about them

our grandparents or other relatives told usabout them

we found something written (obit, countyhistory, military unit history) about them

This morning a friend wrote about a recipe he foundfor "APPLE CRISP." He mentioned that he had asked his mother about ittoward the end of her life, but her stove was broken, so they didn't press herfor details. Now that she has gone, he wishes he had at least helped her makeit, and then taken it home to his place to bake it. Isn't it interesting howchildhood memories of food seem to rate high on our list of favorite things?

Why not write up a little story about somethingas seemingly insignificant as Mom's Apple Crisp?

DON'T YOU THINK STORIES LIKE THIS WOULD BE ADELIGHTFUL ADDITION TO YOUR COMPILED FAMILY HISTORY? Put the the apple crispstory right there in notes for your mom. Write a paragraph in your Dad's notesabout his favorite things -- working on the boat, preparing for a bow huntingtrip with the guys, a baseball game. (That reminds me, I am perhaps the onlydaughter who truly appreciated that her dad once gave her season tickets to theUniversity of Washington Huskies football games for a Christmas present.) Ishould write about that, and how my dad took me to a few games (just the 2 ofus) when I lived nearby as a young mother.

Funny how little recollections of one incident willlead to another, for instance:

I CANNOT BELIEVE MY PARENTS LET ME take thebus to the orthodontist by myself. We thought nothing of it in the early 1960s,quite different from life in 2005! I walked about 2 miles from our home at 421655th NE in Laurelhurst to the bus stop across the street from the Rexall(spelling?) Drugstore. Somehow I had been taught to get off at the right stopand walk another block or two to the ortho's office.

THAT STORY REMINDS ME HOW GUILTY I FEEL thatI inadvertently stole a small 18 cent pink eraser from that drug store at aboutthe same time. I was shopping for back-to-school items while mom sat under thehair dryer at the nearby beauty salon. I was probably in 4th or 5th grade. I wastrying to juggle an fountain pen, a bottle of ink, a notebook and filer paperwith a pack of pencils and that darned eraser. I remember attempting to lookthrough a stack of 3x5 inch small spiral pads, but the eraser kept falling tothe floor. (Was this in the days before shopping carts?) Anyway, I guess I putthe eraser in the pocket of my light-weight jacket and I didn't find it untilthe next spring when I wore the jacket again. At that time I was paralyzed byfear, and didn't do anything. Years later as an adult I returned to Seattle, anddrove past the the site, and found that the drugstore building was empty. Ican't imagine how my 18 cent error put the Rexall out of business, but that isthe first thought that crossed my mind. They have amnesty for overdue books atthe library, but there was no way I could "fix" the pink erasersituation.

So, DearREADERS, let's "flesh out" ourfamily tree by making anecdotal entries in addition to the names, dates andplaces in our genealogy software. Entering childhood memories could really makeor family histories much more interesting for the generations that follow.